One of the principal interactions between an educator and a learner (or student) is the creation of a course, the assignment of tasks and activities related to learning, and the assessment of a learner's response to those tasks and activities. A fundamental function of the educator is to assess a learner's competency or understanding of a given topic. Typically, an educator will do this by setting an assignment that has goals and objectives associated with that assignment. The learner then executes that assignment within a given time frame and the educator then assesses the learner's response. This assessment helps the educator to form a judgment as to how well the learner understands a particular concept or topic.
Traditionally, there are two forms of assessment that an educator uses: (1) subjective assessment; and (2) non-subjective assessment. The non-subjective form as assessment generally manifest itself as a quiz having true or false answers or single word responses. There is no subjectivity regarding the given responses, and the responses are either right or wrong.
The second type of assessment that an educator often will use is called subjective assessment. The subjective form of assessment generally manifests itself in the form of an essay. The subjective assessment contains a great deal of opinion and other subjectivity as to what the learner has expressed and how the educator defines from what the learner has presented in the essay whether or not the learner has understood the topic.
Regarding the non-subjective type of assessment, one challenge is that the nature of quizzes is such that a student can obtain a decent score without really knowing the topic. In other words, the learner can simply guess and still obtain a relatively average score without really understanding the topic. Thus, the score is as much as factor of a learner's understanding of the topic as it is a factor of random chance.
As assessment results (such as grades), however, are becoming increasingly more valuable in today's competitive world, the pressure is on educators for assessment results to be accurate. Because of this pressure, educators increasingly are relying on the subjective form of assessment. Random chance is virtually eliminated with the subjective form of assessment.
There are two challenges associated with the subjective form of assessment. One challenge is that the grading burden on the educator can be enormous. Imagine a professor who has a class of two-hundred students who have each just turned in a ten-page essay on a particular topic. The grading burden on that professor to grade these essays is enormous. Frequently this burden is offset by giving the grading task to multiple teaching assistants. However, this then introduces inconsistency into the assessment results. In other words, there often is different subjectivity depending on who is performing the grading task. This reduces the confidence in the subjective form of assessment because of the potential for grading inequalities.
The second challenge associated with the subjective form of assessment is getting the learner to actually perform the task or assignment. The attention span of learners today is highly conditioned by the social networking community and the Web 2.0 features. Learners today are involved in online discussions, blogs, wikis, and chat rooms. The idea of exiting that world and writing a ten-page essay in a word processing program is somewhat disconcerting to today's learners.
Today's learners are involved in natural interactions. A natural interaction is defined as a machine-facilitated communication and interaction between human beings that is part of a person's natural desire to communicate with others. This is in contrast to tasks that a person is required to do. Examples of natural interactions include social networking, social computing, making use of Web 2.0 features, discussion boards, blogs, and collaborative wikis, to name a few. Each person has a natural desire to communicate with others, to express our views, and to hear other's views. On the other hand, it is not a natural instinct to want to write essays. The learner simply does the essay in order do it to pass a course. In addition, natural interaction is done on personal device of the learner, such as a learner's smart phone. The learner chooses to use the device, and in fact is using the device multiple times per day already.